Never, In Extremity
by Anguis
Summary: She should have felt like a voyeur, but this was her *partner.* Besides, after all he’d done, surely she was owed this much. Then he quietly wrenched her already-faltering world out of orbit. A post-Purgatory fic.


**Summary:** She should have felt like a voyeur, but this was her _partner_. Besides, after all he'd done, surely she was owed this much. Then he quietly wrenched her already-faltering world out of orbit. A post-Purgatory fic.  
**Disclaimer:** The characters and universe of _Law & Order: Criminal Intent_ belong to Dick Wolf, NBC, USA, etc. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended.  
**Author's Notes:** This fic is set several weeks post-Purgatory as a substitute of sorts to subsequent canon. The title is a nod to Emily Dickinson.

* * *

**Never, In Extremity**

Goren had been in the restroom an awfully long time. Alex Eames shifted in her chair as she tried not to glance up at his vacant seat again. Maybe he was ill. The snarling, wounded part of her hoped he was, so she wouldn't have to see his eyes fixed on her every time she looked up. He was like a puppy kicked to the curb, and dammit, it wasn't fair! _She_ was the injured party, _she_ was the one betrayed, and it galled her that those sad, dark eyes could awaken more guilt in her conscience than any shadowy confessional ever had.

On the other hand, if he'd passed out in a stall and clipped his head on a toilet or choked on his own vomit and she did nothing because she was enjoying the respite, the guilt would be rightly earned, which simply wasn't acceptable. Alex sighed and scanned the room for someone who could set her mind at ease. Swallowing her pride, she sidled up to fellow detective Mike Logan.

"Mike, would you check on Goren? He hasn't come back from the bathroom, and I need to show him something." She hesitated. "He's not sick or anything, is he?"

"What? Oh, ah, I wouldn't worry about it. I'm sure he's okay; just give him a few more minutes." Alex frowned at him. Logan looked suspiciously guilty.

"He's not in the restroom, is he?" His lack of response was more telling than any outright admission, so she leaned into his personal space and asked sternly, "Where is he?" Either her unconscious impersonation of her partner startled Logan into betraying his confidence or the rumors she'd half-heard whispered about her temper as of late really did hold some truth. In any case, he cut his eyes towards Interrogation for a split second before snapping his gaze back to hers.

"The bastard," she muttered, ignoring Logan's fumbling attempts to explain as she strode away, heels banging angrily against the linoleum.

The door to the observation room yielded with a satisfying slam that made Captain Ross jump. She could see Goren through the glass, shuffling papers across the table from a sullen, dark-haired teen and stretching the silence out to unnerving proportions.

"What the hell is he doing in there?"

"Interrogating a suspect. And Eames, you're out of line."

"I'm out of line? _I'm_ out of line?" She laughed mirthlessly. "My partner sneaks off to interrogate _our_ suspect, you don't see fit to tell me, and _I'm_ the one who's out of line? I don't believe this!"

Ross raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Look, just go back to your desk, finish going through the Fisher phone records, and forget you were here."

"What?" Alex could taste the belligerence etching her voice. "Is this how it's gonna be now? You and him making deals behind closed doors, keeping me out of the loop until I almost kill someone because you don't trust me?"

"Enough, Eames. That's water under the bridge, and you'd do well to remember that. We're not trying to pull one over on you. Goren's convinced he can get this kid to talk, but he didn't want you here." He sighed. "I don't pretend to know what goes on in that brain of his. I just want this case solved, alright?"

_He didn't want you here._ Alex put her hand on the cool glass to ground herself as the words echoed and re-echoed in her ears. A physical pain blossomed in her stomach, and it was all she could do not to curl over into the unexpected ache.

Before Ross could make the request again, her partner abruptly abandoned his delaying tactics. His soft, inquisitive voice drifted through the speakers and distracted the captain from any further attempts to dismiss Alex.

"Kyle--I can call you Kyle, right?" The teen shrugged.

"You know, the law requires us to give a parent the chance to be present for the questioning of any child under sixteen. We gotta do stuff by the books, see, or the DA gets down our throats. Now, I can understand that your dad's a little . . . preoccupied with serving his life sentence in Attica. You wouldn't care too much to see him anyway, though, would you? He abandoned you and your mom, what, twelve years ago?" Kyle shrugged again. "Ah, but your mother. Now, where is she? I mean, you're only fifteen--your mom's still responsible for you. It's her . . . duty to look after you. And, and she's your _mother_--by all rights she should be beating down our door to get to you, to protect you. We did our part and contacted her. So, where is she?" He pushed his chair back suddenly and stood up. Kyle flinched but managed to recover his impassive demeanor as Goren began pacing in front of the two-way mirror.

"What could possibly keep a mother from her child? Maybe it slipped her mind. Nah, this isn't the sort of thing you'd forget. Maybe, _maybe_ she thought she had something better to do. Now what could make her so . . . selfish that she'd leave you here _all alone_?" He had found the weak spot, and his voice crescendoed as he kept picking away at it. Alex felt her pulse begin to race. For everything he'd endured--for everything he'd put her through--she couldn't deny that he could still put on a show like no one else. "Is she a drug addict? Is that it? Or maybe she's a whore. Is she too busy banging some john right now to--"

"Stop it!" Kyle's aloofness wavered, cracked, and fell to pieces at his feet. "Don't talk like that about my mom. She's none of those things. It's me. I screwed up, okay? Big time. She won't talk to me anymore." He dropped his gaze to his ragged fingernails and whispered, "She said she can't love me after what I did."

Goren halted. "What'd you do? What could you have done that was so terrible your own mother stopped loving you?"

Kyle worried at his last remaining hangnail, tugging the skin taut, releasing, and tugging again until it finally ripped. Splaying his hands on the table, Goren tilted his head to look into the teen's anguished face.

He asked quietly, "When there's no one left to love you, what's the point in going on?" Kyle raised startled eyes to the detective leaning in close to him. "You . . . you've got it all figured out, don't you? How you're gonna . . . ah, _go_, I mean. I bet you've got every last detail planned out."

"How'd you know?"

Goren straightened up abruptly, pinching the back of his neck. He considered the ashen face and the bony wrists twisting and twitching and the pleading dark eyes. His whole frame sagged, and then he lurched around the table to drop heavily back into his chair. It was eerily similar to a large building imploding, collapsing in on itself as it sank majestically to the ground, and a sudden chill rushed up Alex's arms. "I, I know because . . . I know because I'm there."

The silence from the speakers stopped up Alex's ears with wool, raising the beating of her heart to a thunderous pitch inside her head. _He didn't want you here. He didn't want you here._ Suddenly, _she_ didn't want to be here, but nothing could erase his confession from her memory, and there was nowhere else but here that mattered.

With a steady hand, Goren unstrapped his holstered sidearm and set it on the table in front of him. "This is my way out." He lowered his voice, confiding in Kyle with a conspiratorial glance back at the glass. "I've, uh, I know the exact angle to press against my soft palate--'cause if you tilt it just a few degrees the wrong way, you miss your chance and get to spend the rest of your life in a care facility with a screwed-up brain to match your screwed-up life. But I know how to get the job done right. Slide my lips around that smooth metal and bang! everyone's problems are solved."

"So why haven't you done it?"

"Same reason you haven't, Kyle."

"Oh." He slumped in his chair in disappointment. "You're a coward, then."

Goren slammed his palms down on the table and pushed himself up, sucking in ragged breaths. "You are _not_ a coward! Cowards lose themselves in a bottle or pop some pills before they do the deed." Without warning, he clamped his hand on Kyle's left arm and pulled it forward, palm up. "Every night, with a clear head, you set that knife to your wrist, here, and every night you let it bite your skin enough to mark it, but you don't pull it down, you don't finish it off." He released his grip, and the boy pulled his arm back, tucking it in to his chest and cradling it. "Why not? Why the hell not?"

"I don't know!" Kyle cringed and whimpered, "I don't know! I don't know!"

Bobby raised a long, elegant index finger and waved it hypnotically. In a quiet voice, he replied, "I do. It's because you have, you have . . . _hope_, don't you?" He stepped around behind Kyle. "It's this cruel little shard of glass right, right _here_--" One large hand spanned his thin chest, effortlessly pinning him to the back of his chair. "--that keeps you from doing it. You still love your mom, and as long as you love her, you'll have that hope that she can somehow, someday see past this seemingly insurmountable barrier between you and _love you back_."

A tear, and then a rivulet, and then a deluge.

Bobby sank to his knees next to him, wrapping his arms around the weeping boy and pulling him tightly to his chest. He murmured words soothing and low as they awkwardly hunched together, his own face carefully averted from the two-way mirror.

Goren remained on his knees with an arm slung around Kyle as he haltingly divulged the discovery of the gun in a dumpster near his apartment building, the siren call of the dull metal cushioned amid the rotting debris, the swagger at that promise of power cradled between his palms, the concomitant flashes of anger and muzzle fire at a now-forgotten slight, the disbelief as his little brother--the same little brother he shared his room and his secrets with, who teased him and always tagged along--crumpled to the pavement in a torrent of red, the shame of abandoning him in the alley, and the complete and utter desolation when he confessed to his mother and received silence instead of absolution. Bobby interjected soft words of commiseration, encouragement, and understanding; unlike the carefully staged performances of most interrogations, they were sincere--no mockery or goading, just spare, heartfelt nudges down a torturous path with no reprieve in sight.

Later, in the gloom of her lamp-lit bedroom, Alex would wonder what sort of person she'd become that there was no room in her raw heart for a twinge or two for the little lost boy who'd killed both his brother and his mother's love in three clumsy seconds of childish passion. For now, though, she felt only the ache for the little boy lost in a hulking man's body, wondering how she could have let him wander so far and so alone.

Before her partner heaved himself stiffly off the floor, before Ross could turn his attention back to her, before her legs finished their transformation into jelly, Alex vanished out the door. She sought refuge in the bathroom, the first safe haven she saw.

The latch of the stall escaped her fumbling fingers as the door banged shut, and she collapsed onto the toilet seat. The world had gone gray and cold, and she couldn't stop her body from rocking back and forth violently. If she cried . . . but she couldn't even contemplate the possibility, because once started she feared she'd never stop, and she had to compose herself before Bobby and his gun left the building.

When her knees could support her without wobbling and her hands stopped shaking, Alex carefully rinsed her hands in warm water to ease their chill, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. She didn't think she could stand to see the empty space above her left shoulder and couldn't fathom that blank nothingness hovering just behind her for the rest of her life. Perhaps that was why Bobby lately looked as though he rarely glanced in a mirror anymore--too many voids surrounding his reflection that let the bare wall stare through.

As she stepped back into the corridor, the impassive clock on the wall confirmed the lateness of the hour. Alex jogged in the direction of the elevator bank, turning the corner just in time to see a familiar dark silhouette filling the gap between closing doors. She anxiously pressed the down button over and over until the next car arrived, a fearful question crowding out her usually more rational thoughts. What if this were the night he would drive away and never report back again?

As the little lights counted down the floors, a sudden, nauseating flash of clarity illuminated the disarray of her frantic musings. She'd been waiting all this time for him to say something, do something to heal the rift he'd torn in their relationship, waiting for the master showman to pull one more impossible rabbit out of his hat. But he had done all he could, in his own clumsy way, and now it was her turn to accept or reject the proffered olive branch--if he hadn't already given up and snatched it back.

By the time Alex dashed into the parking garage, Bobby had already wedged himself behind the wheel and was inserting his key into the ignition. Without hesitation, she wrenched open the passenger's door and flung herself into the seat. He looked as though he were anticipating the imminent reappearance of the burger he'd scoffed at lunch, but he squared his broad shoulders and twisted his head so he could stare past her face and out her window.

"Oh, hey, Eames. You, uh, weren't at your desk, so I--"

"Give me your gun." Alex held out her hand, surprised and relieved at its steadiness. She'd never been so frightened in her life; a single pulled thread could unravel her composure, and she didn't trust herself to be able to knit it up again.

At first nonplussed, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed to ask the reason for this puzzling non sequitur, but before the first word gathered the impetus to push past his tongue, comprehension broke wild and stormy across his face. In his agitation, the first coherent thought that charged out of his mouth was not at all diplomatic. "Ross p-promised me you wouldn't be there."

"Apparently you trust him more than you do me. Not a wise move, Goren." The words lay bitter on her tongue even as he began to plead in broken fragments.

"It-it's not that! Please don't-- I, I trust you with my--" He stumbled to a stop, eyes wide and panicked. "Look, it had to be done, and Ross knows I'll say anything--be anyone--to get a confession. He, he already congratulated me on a . . . convincing performance. But, you . . . you _know_ me. I couldn't, _couldn't_ have done it if I'd known you were behind the glass. I'm sorry." His eyelids fluttered closed, and he tipped his head back, clenching his hands into fists as they started to tremble. His breaths gasped loud and uneven in the silence of the car as he replayed in his mind what she must have heard.

It was too close to spit-slicked metal to watch him fall apart, so she jabbed her still outstretched hand into his gut. As he sucked in a surprised breath and straightened up to look at her, she drove her fingers home again fiercely, relishing the soft give beneath her fingertips and his slight grunt and hoping for a bruise to remind him how completely stupid and selfish and _wrong_ he was.

"_Bobby_, give me your damn gun!" Her voice frayed and broke, and tears were leaking into her eyes faster than she could blink them away. He shifted onto one hip to dig under his voluminous coat, but it was a large, white handkerchief he placed in her palm, bending her fingers closed on it, his warm hand engulfing hers for a moment or two.

He shook his head, and a shadow of his old smile tugged sadly at the corners of his mouth. "You don't have to worry about that. Like Kyle, I have hope."


End file.
